"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave".----Breece D'J Pancake, in a letter to his mother.

Adam Tedesco

How to Speak about My Heart

My heart’s a Pizza Hut

That doesn’t serve beer

That you have to walk to

Through a cherry orchard

By the time you get there

You realize you could’ve

Eaten free cherries

You wind up hating yourself

For eating this garbage instead

My heart’s fat and lazy

Done too many deadlifts

With horrible form

Its back is shot

It’s tired of dieting

Orders a pizza

Then watches

Every episode

Of Law & Order

With Paul Sorvino

My heart’s your last line

Of coke dissolving

Into condensation

On a toilet tank

You stare

In disbelief

Then a bouncer pulls

At your collar

After the Smoke

The sky’s a knot of wires

And I am with you

To be crushed

Between slabs of time

To make a singing light

I put on Combat Shock

The desperate view of slicing

An arm rubbing junk into the cut

This is the secret of words

A gavel pounding the sea

A fist at rest

A fist we pay for hopelessly

In secret words in wires

Hanging from a chain of days

Word of my mouth

Is all books up in the sky

All wood up in the sky

Transposed in formless

Bands of color killing

Men killing the birds

The secret of the sky

Is pretending it exists

Like us the weekend

After the smoke

My favorite souvenir is a skull shaped ceramic cigarette holder that my grandfather bought in Japan while on leave during the Korean War. My grandfather quit smoking after dropping his cigarette while driving, and then crashing his car trying to retrieve it, resulting in my grandmother having to undergo emergency brain surgery.

Adam Tedesco has worked as a shipbuilder, a meditation instructor, a telephone technician and cultural critic for the now disbanded Maoist Internationalist Movement. He is conducts interviews and analyzes dreams for the online literary journal Drunk In A Midnight Choir. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Witch Craft Magazine, Funhouse, Zoomoozophone Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart and elsewhere. He lives in a religious community outside of Albany, New York, where he prays to rabbits in the dark.